The Election Commission of India has initiated a special summary revision of electoral rolls, using 1 January 2027 as the qualifying date, having passed over the routine annual exercise in both 2025 and 2026. The move followed reports that the ECI had been placing obstacles before younger voters attempting to register for the first time, while those dropped from electoral rolls during the special intensive revision were being directed to submit Form 6 as a means of reclaiming their enrolment.

Procedural adjustments and clarifications to the SIR process were rolled out by the ECI after legal challenges reached the Supreme Court and public scrutiny of the exercise increased. Matters of transparency, voter-roll deletions, restoration procedures, and amendments to Form 6 have come before the court on multiple occasions. The court stated that the revised Form 6 had been neither ruled upon nor sanctioned by it, pushing back against the position the ECI had put forward.

The Election Commission of India has also moved to provide political parties with electoral rolls in a machine-readable digital format, addressing a longstanding demand that the Congress party had taken to the Supreme Court in 2018 without resolution at that time. Under the same arrangement, updates covering new entries, removals, and amendments to voter rolls would be passed on to political parties, legible copies of those rolls made available to candidates standing for election, and a running weekly tally of claims and objections forwarded to party representatives.

Automated screening tools identified approximately 33 lakh voter entries in New Delhi as containing logical inconsistencies, a matter the Election Commission of India has since brought to the notice of observers. Rather than calling voters in for individual verification sessions — where they would have been asked to present documents confirming their identity, age, and nationality — the Commission opted to deploy booth-level officers to conduct doorstep checks of those details, a function those officers were already expected to carry out across three scheduled home visits ahead of the draft electoral roll's release. According to the Election Commission of India, roughly 20 lakh voter entries flagged for discrepancies have since been reinstated on the electoral rolls.

About 37 lakh objections to voter-roll additions — lodged by the Election Commission of India itself, a practice undertaken for the first time — are yet to be heard by appellate tribunals in West Bengal, placing those matters under active judicial consideration.

A multi-part investigation by the Reporters' Collective found that election commission software had produced 85,854 deletion request forms targeting voter registrations in Uttar Pradesh, with no stated reason attached to any of them. State election officials disputed the report's conclusions, describing them as lacking factual basis and containing inaccuracies. A follow-up report carrying the Collective's documented evidence drew a response from the CEO, who stood behind its conclusions. Allegations of coordinated removal of voters from electoral rolls on the basis of religious identity were also part of what he put on record.

In a media response, the CEO characterised the discrepancies as minor errors and technical glitches, adding that the Collective had not allowed the Commission adequate time to address them. The CEO has not addressed how upwards of 80,000 voter records came to be marked for deletion — a dataset in which many entries carry no explanation, while others carry nothing beyond the single-letter designations A, B, or C. As of the time of reporting, neither the CEO nor the Commission has lodged an FIR targeting those accused of attempting mass deletions.

Questions about how fictitious individuals — including at least one identified by the Collective — were able to file mass-deletion requests have gone unanswered by the Commission. Comparable allegations in Gujarat, Karnataka, and Uttarakhand have drawn no public accounting from those responsible.

The Supreme Court issued a notice in response to a petition brought forward by leaders of the INDIA bloc, with Rahul Gandhi — who holds the position of Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha — among those at the forefront of the filing. Those calling for change have pointed out that the concessions now on offer were available at an earlier stage. Questions about whether the Commission acted under legal compulsion have arisen from the delayed rollout of those provisions, which came into effect after their mandated deadlines.